On trying to get somebody – anybody – to read Falling

Get beta readers, they said. Join a critique group, they said. The feedback will be invaluable, they said.

To the friends and family who have read/are reading Falling, I’m grateful. But I’m sure you understand that while your support and pride in my achievement at writing and publishing it means the world to me, I need people who have no investment in me as a person, who couldn’t care less about me or the struggles or time I’ve gone through to write Falling, who only want to be entertained by it and will tell me in no uncertain terms if they aren’t.

In my day job as a film and entertainment writer there’s a tidbit of trivia from one of my favourite movies I always remember. When Jerry and David Zucker and Jim Abrahams made the immortal 1980 spoof comedy Airplane!, Paramount executives were unsure about some of the jokes.

So during test screenings at college campuses in California, the trio sat in and made audio recordings, the audience laughing uproariously at the jokes Paramount took issue with (a sample; ‘Ever been up in a cockpit before?… Ever seen a grown man naked?’) to present as evidence they should be left in.

So the trick to getting honest feedback on your art is by getting consumers/patrons who don’t care about you, which is where the whole community of feedback and critique comes in.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about that whole community. If you’re JK Rowling or Stephen King and you were to offer your book to beta readers for feedback, you’d have lines going round the block at the bookstore/web server. To have beta readers, people have to want to read your book. In this market, it’s hard enough informing anyone your book exists, let alone getting them interested enough to read it.

And my experience with critique groups has been as successful as Hollywood’s attempts to reboot Charlie’s Angels – they just don’t stick. Trying to find one who will accept you is as difficult as trying to find a publisher to begin with. Then, of course, I’m offering to read people’s 80,000 word novel while asking them to read mine, which has over 250,000. The one time I did achieve any semblance of community and activity in a critique group I had to be satisfied with sending the other readers a long outline, so they still weren’t critiquing the prose or style, just the structure.

It’s all a symptom of the state of book readership today. People just don’t read any more. And if they do, they certainly don’t have time to read some untested doorstop in a niche genre.

Buy it? I can’t even get people to read it for free….